64 July2022
modelling moves fast, powered by
astonishing advances in meteorology and
computer power.
“A decade ago, climatologists might have
told you that although direct heat undermined
plant growth, the extra carbon in the
atmosphere would have the opposite eect
— a kind of airborne fertiliser”.
In fact “thicker leaves are worse at
absorbing CO2, an eect that means, by the
end of the century, as much as 6.39 billion
additional tons CO2 in the atmosphere each
year”.
‘Iconoclastic’ mathematician, Irakli
Loladze, showed in ‘The Great Nutrient
Collapse’ that even the protein content of
bee pollen has dropped by a third.
The Devil’s bargain. Eric Holthaus’ term
depicts the choice between public-health
measures destroying airborne pollution
and a dramatic spike in global warming.
A January 2018 paper explained:
“Removing aerosols [pollution] induces a
global mean surface heating of 0.5-1.1°C,
and precipitation increase of 2.0 – 4.6%”.
So if we clean the world’s air the Paris
Agreement’s 1.5°C target will need to
become 2°C-2.6°C. And the 2°C degrees
prescription (‘to limit the global temperature
increase in this century’) would become
2.5°C – 3.1°C.
The known unknown. How humans will
respond is the one factor that we cannot
model.
A literature of choices has arisen.
From David Beckel’s self-immolation in
Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in 2018 (shades of
the Vietnamese war) to Geo Mann and Joel
Wainwright’s ‘Climate Leviathan: A Political
Theory of Our Planetary Future’ (‘a call to arms
for planetary sovereignty’); through Harald
Welzer’s ‘Climate Wars’ (‘what people will be
killed for in the 21st century’); to Andreas
Malm’s ‘The Progress of this Storm’ (his follow
on from ‘Fossil Capital’); to James Scott’s ‘Two
Cheers for Anarchism’ (self-explanatory); all
the way through Adam Frank’s ‘Light of the
Star’ (astrobiology of the Anthropocene
Climate apathy and indierence can be eco-
nihilism. But they can also be the “repurposing
of ascetic traditions, stretching from the
young Buddha through the pillar saints”.
And the future does not end at 2100 just
because most climate modelling, by
convention, sunsets at 2100. The author
shares some of his colleague’s description of
what is to come: the hundred years that follow
they call the “century of hell”.
Tony Lowes is a director of Friends of the Irish
Environment
‘The Uninhabitable Earth, A Story of the
Future’,
“Heat death is among the cruellest
punishments to a human body. First comes ‘heat
exhaustion’, mostly a mark of dehydration:
profuse sweating, nausea, headache. After a
certain point, though, water won’t help, your core
temperature rising as your body sends blood
outward to the skin, hoping desperately to cool
it down. The skin often reddens; internal organs
begin to fail. Eventually you could stop sweating.
The brain, too, stops working properly, and
sometimes, after a period of agitation and
combativeness, the episode is punctuated with
a lethal heart attack”.
And in the two years since the book’s release?
Fires rampage in Australia, California and
Russia all break records. Droughts recur.
Unprecedented floods deluge Germany and
South Africa. Melting permafrost fractures Arctic
oil pipelines. Freak Texas cold snap cripples
State’s electricity grid. Hurricane hits Haiti two
days after its devastating 2021 earthquake.
“A cascading violence, waterfalls and
avalanches of devastation, the planet pummelled
again and again, with increasing intensity and in
ways that build on each other and undermine our
ability to respond”.
The shibboleths fall. The science of climate
“It is worse, much worse, than you think”. So
begins a tour de force of our climate change story
in all its harrowing manifestations.
David Wallace-Wells’ encyclopaedic inventory
marshals the horror story that “ignorance and
indierence” have hidden from us. “This is not a
book about the science of warming”, he writes:
“it is about what warming means to the way we
live on this planet”.
But at its heart it is about us: a ‘known
unknown’. Because the future of our civilisation
hangs on the actions we take.
Many know the catalogue of the deaf ear:
Fourier, 1824; Tyndall, 1861; Arrhenius, 1896;
Keeling, 1958; Broecker, 1975; Hanson, 1988;
Gore, 2014. We can add Wallace-Wells’ 2020
book, based on his cover story in New York
magazine, the most-read story the magazine has
ever published – reviewed as “this generation’s
‘Silent Spring’” by the Washington Post.
“Since 1980, the planet has experienced a
fifty-fold increase in the number of dangerous
heat waves; in the heat, roads in cities melt and
train tracks buckle. The deadly European heat
wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000
people a day, killed 35,000 Europeans, the
direct-heat eects compounded by broken
public health infrastructure”.
“At two degrees, there would be thirty-two
times as many extreme heat waves in India, and
each would last five times as long, exposing
ninety-three times more people. This is our best-
case scenario”.
Apolcalypse shortly: Tony Lowes
reviews ‘The Uninhabitable Earth,
A Story of the Future’
by David Wallace-Wells (Google eBooks $5.99)
“Someday, perhaps not long from now, the
inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and
biologically diminished planet than the one
on which I lived may wonder what you and I
were thinking, or whether we thought at all”
— John Steinbeck
“We all lived for money, and that is what we
died for”
— William Vollmann
“The future is already here, it just isn’t
evenly distributed”
— William Gibson
ENVIRONMENT